Why do you collect Ancient coins?

Because women dig ancient coins. Just ask @TIF .


Okay I'll be serious for a moment. I collect ancient coins because transcend anything that I can read in books, or any documentaries I may watch, and help me to form a deeper bond and appreciation for the people of the ancient world. One thing is to read about it, but it's quite another to hold in your hands an object that dozens or hundreds of ancient people held.

 

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I like holding history in my hands. My coins are coated with traces of centurion blood, gladiator sweat, pagan altar smoke and ancient olive oil. It's fun to imagine all of the transactions they may have facilitated.

In my coins, I feel a connection to the past, not just to the ancient world, but to those collectors of the Enlightenment who studied and cataloged the coins before me. I feel as if I'm part of a great tradition, going back to Eckhel, Banduri, Sulzer, Wiczay, Mionnet, Cohen, et al.

Not only do I feel a kinship with the denizen of the Roman empire who might have used this sestertius to buy a pair of sandals for his six-year-old granddaughter, but I feel a kinship with the nearsighted old numismatist in the eighteenth century describing his treasure in scholarly Latin:

 

One of the things I find most fascinating is trying to solve some of the puzzles presented by ancient coins. I have a number of areas that interest me that I like to work on. I doubt I will every come to a satisfactory solution to many of them but they are fun trying to work them out.

 

What's funny about that is that the nicer condition a coin, the more unlikely it even did one of those actions.

 

My personality and interests largely coalesced and crystallized before I learned how to ride a bike, with a deep love and fascination with history, artifacts, antiques and coins representing a central facet. I'm a strong visual and tactile learner and thinker so handling objects has always been an irresistible inclination, if not an absolute necessity. I bought my first 2 ancients from a generous Baltimore show dealer when I was 6, and can still recall the immersive and lovely albeit imperfect mental world that handling them automatically sucked me into.

Coins are artifacts, and artifacts in general are potent portals into the past. Holding them is like taking a trip in a time machine where the imagination can wander within the broad parameters set by the time and place of origin. I may never know the names of the individuals who created and used the artifacts, but the reality of the items implies the reality of their creators and those who interacted with the pieces in spite of their names having been lost to the sands of time. They lived and loved and struggled and died then turned into dust long before I came into being, but the reality of their artifactual residues means that once they were just as real as anyone alive today; perhaps more real and alive since they actually had to fight, work and suffer to earn their existence unlike the coddled comfortable drones of today whose entire meaningless life can be subsidized by the government from cradle to grave.

I collect because the more historically effervescent items inspire and anchor learning about past realities, and are capable of launching factually constrained voyages of the imagination which can be so pleasurable and viscerally tangible that when I snap out of the daydreaming and reenter the mundane cadence of present reality it often feels as if I've gone to sleep. I love the ambiguity and mysterious nature of many artifacts, so while it appeals to the analytical side of the brain to have mysteries solved and questions concretely answered, the eternal uncertainties are a sort of romantic fertilizer for open-ended intuitive contemplation; an exercise that nurtures profound insights and appreciation for the difficult path from the stone age to the stars that our magnificent species is traversing.

 

Thanks folks! It sure is interesting to read all of the comments. I notice several similar themes in the responses.

 

How I started and why I stay are questions that will get two very different answers from me. As for others it did begin with touching the ancient. But over the years I have come to collect many kinds of ancient artifacts and work with ancient texts. Touching antiquity is commonplace in my life now, and I do not fantasize about it. So a shift has taken place.

These days this sums it up for me too. In particular I like to pursue the mass of detail in ancient coin imagery to uncover the ways the celators used it to encode some pretty mundane things, like where and when the coin was made. How did they evolve the system that they created for encoding mint location, series, workshops, or ultimately who did the work? I use this approach for my pursuit of Roman Imperial coinage only, and not even all of that. But there is never a dull moment, and never enough.

 

The academic possibilities are endless with ancient coins. The silver content of the denarius overtime shows the decline of the empire with the rise of inflation. Also the collapse of the roman empire also encouraged some amazing barbaric and Ostrogothic copies. All these examples really paint a picture of late roman life and reflect current events - as does most coinage.

 

I collect ancients for a lot of reasons. The two biggest are: #1, the history. It's literally holding history in your hands.#2, you can actually hold them, unlike modern collectors.